


The Nightmare Was Me

by JazzRaft



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Altered Mental States, Disturbing Themes, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Abuse, M/M, Multi, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Psychological Trauma, Rating May Change
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-21
Updated: 2017-07-11
Packaged: 2018-10-08 15:39:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10390074
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JazzRaft/pseuds/JazzRaft
Summary: Noctis marries Ardyn for the long sought-after peace between their kingdoms. Nyx is sent by Regis to be Noct's protector while he lives in Niflheim; Ravus is ordered by Ardyn to be his bodyguard. Isolation and the torture of the chancellor's illusions ruin the prince, until he doesn't know what or who is real anymore.





	1. nightmares are real

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on [tumblr](http://jazzraft.tumblr.com/post/157547991252/i-am-so-in-love-with-your-stories-what-do-you) for an anonymous request.

Being Kingsglaive was something Nyx used to be proud of.

Being Kingsglaive used to represent strength and honor and principle. It used to be his saving grace from a life of loneliness and bitterness. It used to make him feel like one of the good guys. Like he could be the hero he’d needed to be to save his family when he didn’t.

When he’d been in Insomnia, he’d really started to feel like he’d become worthy of the title of Kingsglaive. He’d respected the crest, used to wear it everywhere he went. He’d wanted people to know that this was him. That he’d been built from the glaive. And that if an orphaned scrap of dirt and bones like him could make himself into something deserving of the King’s power, then anyone could achieve this greatness.

But, that had been in Insomnia.

Being Kingsglaive in Gralea meant something different.

It meant looking the other way instead of throwing himself at the danger he could see right in front of his face. It meant pretending not to hear the screams behind closed doors at night or the quiet, plaintive cries into the dawn, afraid to face another day in this gilded hell. It meant not staring at the crimson, crescent-shaped marks underneath Noctis’s hair where the chancellor’s nails had dug inside to stuff nightmares past his skull, and where Noctis had clawed at his own head to get them out.

Being Kingsglaive in Gralea didn’t mean being a hero.

It meant being an enabler.

But, what was he to do? He’d been sent here to protect the prince from assassins and fatal injury and to ensure the physical safety of the future King. How was he supposed to protect him from his own husband without inciting an international incident?

Not like Noctis would ever allow him to raise a hand to Ardyn if it meant endangering Luna’s freedom.

Nor would Ravus allow it, either.

Ardyn’s pawn had been put into play not long after the prince had been delivered to Gralea, packaged with a glaive for added security. The chancellor had raised the king’s insurance policy with one of his own. Ravus shadowed Nyx’s every step since arriving in Gralea, and acted as a wall between everything he wanted to oppose.

In the early days, whenever Nyx had wanted to kick in the door of the chancellor’s suite to rescue Noctis from his horrific illusions, there had been Ravus. Hauling him back and warning him of the consequences should he interfere. Should a Lucian of the royal employ enact violence upon a Nif of similar or higher position – or vice versa – the contract was voided, and war resumed.

Marrying Noctis off had ensured peace between the two nations, as well as awarded the Princess of Tenebrae her freedom from Niflheim jurisdiction. Luna had publicly objected to the trade, despite Noctis’s assurances that his participation it was entirely voluntary.

_“It’s not voluntary if you’re given no other choice.”_

The finalization of the deal seemed so far away now. Luna was long gone, but still fighting the Lucian Council for Noctis’s rights, if the news reports were anything to go by. Regis could not be reached for comment on the situation, but everyone knew that all he wanted was his son back, and that he couldn’t say that lest he endangered the treaty that saved so many more than just one life.

If he _knew_ though, Nyx caught himself thinking, as he stood guard on one side of the suite door. If he knew what had become of Noctis in his confinement, if he met the sallow and haunted thing he’d become, would he even recognize him from the wild and passionate youth he’d said goodbye to?

“Perhaps you should get whatever you’re thinking off your chest, Ulric,” Ravus said from his position at the other side of the door. “Your face betrays your thoughts. Hardly an appropriate expression for a guard.”

“Can’t all be as unfeeling as an MT, like you Fleuret.”

It sounded even crueler out loud than it did in his head. He supposed that he really couldn’t fault Ravus for being at least somewhat pleased with the arrangement. It ensured his sister’s freedom, after all. Many a night had passed of Nyx staring at the ceiling, unable to sleep, and putting himself in the other man’s shoes should it have been his own sister in Luna’s place. Family exceeded the well-being of all others, but it still didn’t kill the sour taste in his mouth to think of someone else paying for it. He wasn’t sure if Ravus tasted the same thing.

The terse silence that weighed between them since the inception of their positions resumed. They each stared forward for a while, before Nyx’s impatience broke the stillness. He rolled up his sleeve and checked his watch, biting the inside of his mouth as he glanced at the doors.

“He should have been ready by now,” he muttered.

“Perhaps he has fallen ill.”

“ _Perhaps_ he doesn’t want to put on a show for all those jackasses downstairs.”

Ravus slipped a glare his way for mocking his speech, but it passed right through Nyx. He knocked on the door to the suite. “Almost ready, Your Highness?”

He was met with silence from the other side, and if that made him nervous, the feeling was doubled when even Ravus shot a concerned glance at the door. Nyx knocked and called out again, but didn’t receive anything different. They both entered the room to find it empty and one of the windows open to the side.

Nyx was at the windowsill in an instant, calling out for his charge and climbing halfway out the window in search of him. He was terrified of looking down, lest he find that Noctis had thrown himself to the ground in the only way he thought he could escape this nightmare. His relief at not spotting a corpse twenty stories below was short-lived as Ravus cleared his throat beside him. His fellow guardsmen was leaned halfway out the window too, jerking his head upwards.

A different kind of dread trickled cold through Nyx. Noctis was _dancing_ along the edge of the uppermost rooftop. His arms were angled as if they were wrapped around a partner and he was spinning them around on the precarious ledge. Nyx cursed beneath his breath. He quickly found the gutter that Noctis must have used to climb up and made to follow him.

“You know, there’s a safer way up…” Ravus was saying before Nyx barked a quick “shut up” down at him.

He didn’t pause in his ascent to see if Ravus decided to follow him or not. He hauled himself over the ledge when he reached the roof and called for Noctis again, but the prince didn’t seem to hear him. He was humming a lively waltz to himself, grinning like he was madly in love with the invisible person he had wrapped up in his arms. He was laughing as if someone had just told him a hilarious joke.

“ _Noctis_ ,” Nyx tried. “What are you doing?”

Noctis looked at him then, smiling in delight when he recognized him. “Nyx, you should dance, too! It’s not fair that the guards have to just stand there and look scary for the night. Have some fun, loosen up!”

“Noct, what are you talking about? The party’s downstairs…”

“Have you been drinking? We’re _at_ the party, Nyx. Look around!”

Noctis swept his arm out at the skyline and the empty air between him and it. Nyx lurched forward to catch him before he tripped off the ledge, but Noctis remained earthbound without Nyx’s intervention. His eyes were wild and wide, despite the deep, dark bruises of sleeplessness beneath them. It gave a manic edge to his grin as he whirled back around to Nyx.

“Lighten up, Nyx! It’s a party, it’s fun, we’re all having a good time, you should have a good time, too. You used to be fun, you can still be fun, right?”

Nyx felt like he was choking on a ball of needles. What the hell did he do here? What the hell was going on? Was this the product of one of Ardyn’s illusions again? Or was it something darker, something that had been building up on a fault in Noctis’s mind that finally snapped? Noctis reached out to him suddenly, beckoning him towards the ledge.

“Come on and dance with me. We can still have fun together.”

Nyx eyed the ledge beneath Noctis’s feet, entirely too aware of how little space there was between the back of his heels and open air. Maybe if he grabbed his hand, he could yank him towards him and onto the roof. But, maybe if he tried that, Noctis would pull back, and the both of them would go reeling to their deaths. Noctis’s smile faltered the longer Nyx hesitated, like his rejection physically pained him.

“Sir Ulric has had one too many glasses of champagne I think, My Lord.” Ravus had appeared from an emergency door off to the side of the roof. He stood at attention beside Nyx, arms folded neatly behind his back as he addressed Noctis. “Dancing might not be the best thing for him at the moment. However, if my lord is willing, I should like to have this dance in his stead. Perhaps a little closer to the band so we can hear the music better?”

Ravus turned his head towards an empty space in the middle of the rooftop. Noctis’s smile spread wider as he looked at it. Interpreting his delight as acceptance, Ravus bowed his head and lifted a hand towards the prince. One that he happily took, allowing his guard to lead him towards “the band.” Relief puffed out of Nyx in a harsh sigh to have the prince taken clear of the edge, but his madness persisted.

Ravus played along, pulling Noctis into frame and following the steps of a waltz to the beats that Noctis hummed. As they spun lazily around the rooftop, Nyx caught Ravus’s eye over Noctis’s ruined head. He found no delight in the other man’s eyes. No satisfaction to have the prince’s mind so broken. Nyx thought he might have seen regret in the mismatched gaze. Some kind of sorrow that mirrored Nyx’s own.

They’d both been put into place to ensure Noctis’s safety.

And they’d both failed.


	2. in the dark of the night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He doesn't care that it's treason. They can't stay there anymore.

“Noctis? Come on, wake up, Your Highness.”

Nyx shook his shoulder until the prince’s eyes blinked open, dim blue crescents in the evening gloom. As clouded as the moonlight muffled beyond the bedroom window. Nyx glanced everywhere – at the window, at the suite doors, at the prince, at the damn wardrobe, ‘cause for all he knew there could be Nif guards hiding in there, too.

“Noct – Your Highness – get up. We’re going, okay? Fuck the treaty, I’m getting you out of here. Get dressed.”

Yesterday was the last straw. The chancellor had pushed Noctis too close to the edge. And Nyx didn’t care if it was treason, he couldn’t abide it anymore. He couldn’t pretend for another damned day in this synthetic city that any of this was right. He couldn’t stop hearing Noct’s deranged laughter in his sleep the night before. He couldn’t stop hearing the song he had been humming as he danced on the edge of the tenth story ledge.

Noctis sat up, thin arms shaking beneath him. The bruise-colored hollows of his eyes grew darker every day. And the bright light brimming just behind the blue curtains of his gaze was just about snuffed out. His brow creased as he looked around the room, a dazed concern dizzying his gaze. Nyx’s chest tightened, and he took a slow breath, pressing a hand to the prince’s shoulder.

“Your Highness?” he asked, fear trembling in his blood. “Do you know who I am?”

Noctis turned towards him, hair feathering over his eyes. They looked so… _gray_. All of the laughter that used to color them gone in the fits of madness Ardyn subjected him to. Visions of untold horrors. Cruel imitations of home. Lies that ruined the boundaries between truth and fiction. Nyx didn’t know what Noctis thought was real anymore. He didn’t often pray to the Six, but he prayed to them now that at least _he_ was real to the prince.

Noctis looked at him for a long moment, Nyx’s heart ramming in his chest, counting the seconds and pacing like the MT boot falls he was waiting to hear outside the suite doors. The prince’s stare looked far away for a long time before it slowly narrowed closer, focusing on Nyx’s face, searching the details of it. He reached a shaking hand forward to touch Nyx’s chest, releasing a ragged sigh as his flesh met his.

“Nyx?” he said, uncertainty quivering in his voice.

“Yeah,” Nyx sighed in relief.

Noctis pursed his lips, staring at the stark paleness of his hand against the glaive’s armor.

“We’re… together?”

“We came here together, yeah,” Nyx told him, swallowing a hard lump in his throat. “Do you know _where_ you are?”

Noctis looked confused by Nyx’s answer before directing his stare around the room again.

“Not home,” he confirmed, voice going dry as the certainty crashed over him.

“We’re going home though, okay? I’m taking you back. Get dressed. Quick and quiet. Take whatever you can’t leave behind. I’ve already got all the provisions we’ll need to make it out there.”

Nyx patted the strap of the duffel bag slung over his shoulder. All the curatives, non-perishable food, bottles of water, blankets, and bandages that he could stuff into one bag. Every gil to his name and whatever else he could find in Noct’s suite. They had to flee to the slums of Gralea, far, _far_ below the huge red eyes of the airships that monitored the city. He figured they could last a day or two there, hiding in the alleys, maybe sheltered by a displaced Nif if they were lucky before they headed into the sewers. It would be a long trek underground until the run-off emptied into the sea. The plan stopped there for now. Depending on where the sewage took them, they could end up in the middle of a cliff-face, too high above the sea to jump into it. Wherever it took them, they could warp the rest of the way they needed to go.

Noctis pressed his hand to his eyes, rubbing he clouds of sleep and delusion from his eyes. He rested his knuckles against his forehead, eyes closed for a moment, while he reordered his reality.

“I… I can’t leave,” he realized, slowly. “The treaty… I have to stay. There’ll be war. I won’t start a war. And Luna…”

“Noctis, _listen_ to me,” Nyx said, grabbing him by the shoulders and squeezing tight to hold his gaze. “Luna will be fine. She’s home, she’s safe, and she’s strong, remember? They’d have to send an army to take her back.”

“They would,” Noctis said, shaking his head. “And then it would start all over again. I can’t do that, Nyx, I can’t leave. Lucis, Insomnia, _Dad_ … I can’t put them through war again. It’s been so long since we had peace…”

“What about _your_ peace, huh? Noct, you might be the Crown Prince, but you’re a son of Lucis just as much as you’re a son of the King. And as a son of Lucis, you deserve this peace just as much as the rest of us.”

Maybe Nyx was a little mad himself. He knew there would be consequences for stealing the prince from the Empire – and that, as much as he would accept the consequences himself, Niflheim was too petty not to put the whole of the blame on all of Lucis. He knew he must have gone crazy when he _didn’t care_. Peace was all he had ever wanted. He wanted homes to stop burning like his had, sisters to stop dying like his had, friends to stop bleeding like his had. And it had stopped. For _years_.

And maybe it was being in Gralea for too long, where greed was the currency of the day – where everything was weighed by gain – that made him think the cost was too great. When once he would have thought there was no cost great enough to pay for peace. Maybe his time in the Empire had poisoned him more than he thought. Maybe this escape plan was purely selfish. It _was_ purely selfish. It was him trying to ease his own guilt at being unable to protect his charge.

And right now, he just _did not care_.

“Get up,” he ordered, harsher this time. “Or do you like having that snake tear your mind apart?”

Noctis stared up at him, his eyes lost in that fog between dream and reality; madness and sanity. He didn’t know which one did it – Nyx didn’t know what was right or wrong anymore – but finally, Noctis stumbled out of bed. He steadied himself against the bedpost for a moment, blinking rapidly, filtering between different realities before he found the right one.

Nyx peered between the crack in the doors while Noctis changed into his Lucian fatigues. He took nothing else with him that couldn’t fit in his pockets – a single fox-shaped charm was all Nyx caught him storing away. His own clothes hung a little looser than they once had, Nyx noticed. The mental distress had taken its toll on his body as well as his mind. The prince was a ghost of what he used to be.

That thought alone convinced Nyx that he had to go through with this. That it would be _worth_ it. He didn’t know if that was true, but he lied to himself if it wasn’t, anyway.

Nyx had spent so long stalking the halls of the Emperor’s palace that he knew it nearly as well as he knew the Citadel. He knew the guard rotations, he knew the right corners to tuck away into, he knew where each security camera pointed. He knew the faults in the enemy’s patterns. He’d spent decades training to find the weaknesses in Niflheim technology, and if this wasn’t the most important pay-off to that practice, he didn’t know what was.

Noctis clung to his back like a pale shadow, a weak slip of moonlight chasing Nyx’s heels. Nyx’s head swiveled forward and back, watching their route and watching Noctis. He followed Nyx as if he were in a trance, his eyes downcast, half-closed, swaying unsteadily on his feet. Nyx occasionally reached back to stay a hand around his arm, the contact sending a tiny jolt of wakefulness through the prince, enough to keep him on course and out of sight of the machines Nyx was so carefully avoiding.

They made it out to the yard unseen – a militant garden of trimmed hedges and clipped grass so perfect it could have been fake. Nyx wouldn’t be surprised if it was.

“Just a little bit further, Your Highness,” Nyx coached, gripping his wrist to draw him further away from the threat of his dreams.

“Whatever you say,” Noctis murmured, vacantly.

Nyx glanced back to find the prince’s eyes on him. They were hooded and heavy, a small, drunken smile appearing over his sallow lips. There was an affection to his expression that Nyx had never seen on him before. Especially not directed at _him_.

 _“We’re… together?”_ Noctis had asked him, and Nyx had pretended that it was anything but what Noctis was truly asking.

His stomach curdled at the thought of what fantasy Ardyn had created, only to tear apart in Noctis’s head. His blood ran cold, thinking about what he had been made into inside of Noctis’s visions. Nyx smiled, and hoped it looked more convincing than it felt.

“Good boy,” he said. “Come on.”

Noctis’s smile spread at the endearment, his wrist slipping up in Nyx’s grip as he led him to the garden wall. Until his fingers laced with his. Nyx swallowed on the ball of needles in his throat, guilt coursing through him as he fed into the illusion by squeezing his fingers back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *fingers guns* eyy guess which painful af au is getting a full-blown chaptered fic *laughs hysterically* ahahahahelpme


	3. this is real

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Noctis remembers a great many things. Not all of them are true.

It wasn’t a treaty. It was a trade.

He remembered that much, for a certainty. He remembered that the terms Niflheim had presented to Lucis were accepted with forced smiles and white-knuckled handshakes. He remembered murmurs of dissatisfaction behind closed doors and sour displeasure steeping the city streets. He remembered a disenfranchised people, harassed by decades of televised conquest and fearful of a receding Wall, grudgingly consenting to the King’s ultimate decision to sign away his son’s future.

He couldn’t remember if his father had cried or cackled the day he sent him off. He couldn’t remember if he loved him or loathed him.

There were two versions of a father that haunted his brain. He didn’t know which one was his. He was starting to fear that neither of them were. That he had forgotten who his father truly was, and that the face which repeated in his dreams – no matter if it was smiling or scowling at him – was just a fabrication, scribbled onto the canvas of his mind with the ink of his old nightmares.

He didn’t know if the silver-haired man with the sad, hazel-green eyes really loved him. He didn’t remember if he truly existed somewhere outside of his head. He didn’t know if there was an old man with kind, crinkled eyes, missing him; mourning him.

He didn’t know if the man in the pin-stripe suit and slicked-back hair truly hated him. He didn’t remember any of the things he might have done to earn the brusque turn of his shoulder to him. He didn’t know if he had smiled, sinister and scathing and triumphant to be rid of him at last, as he was packed into the car and delivered to this prison.

He didn’t know what was true. But he knew that it was wrong to be this lost in his own head.

And he knew that it was the Chancellor, Ardyn Izunia, who had kicked him off the road and waved to him as he fell, flailing and screaming, into this fractured abyss.

He was always afraid to open his eyes now. Sometimes, he opened them and he was still dreaming. Sometimes, he opened them over and over again, but could never tell if he was awake.

Sometimes, he opened them and _he_ was there. Yellow-eyed and smirking down at him. And the most terrifying part was that he didn’t know if he was really there or not. He didn’t know if the monster who grabbed his hair and shoved his face against the mirror to watch daemons reach for him from the other side of the pane was a nightmare inside of his head, or outside of it.

Waking up was just as frightening as falling asleep.

When he opened his eyes this time, he was somewhere he didn’t recognize. He allowed himself one, small shiver of relief. He was never anywhere new in his nightmares. The playgrounds he was pushed into were always warped rooms from his memories: the Citadel’s throne room, coated in black ink; his apartment bedroom, high above the world with no way out but through the windows; his new suite in the capital city with six feet of dirt packed against every escape out.

The room was small; more of a box than a living space, really. He was cramped onto a paper-thin mattress, low to the floor and smelling like fabric freshener to drench the permeating stench of something old and rotten – like vomit or piss or sweat, he didn’t really want to guess. It was jammed between two, deeply water-stained walls and facing a swollen, gray door, glinting with a pitiful chain lock. There was a room around the corner of each wall. He knew because he could see a dim, yellow light glowing from around the right one, and could hear heavy steps shifting on the other side of the left.

It was a greater relief when Nyx marched around the corner, traversing the narrow strip of space into the next room, fishing through a time-worn duffel bag as he went.

Noctis blinked and shifted underneath the scratchy sheet thrown over him. Nyx backpedaled into the little alcove of a bedroom, dropping the bag to the side and kneeling down next to the bed. The concern and relief on his face alarmed Noctis for a moment. How long had he been asleep?

“You okay, Highness?”

He didn’t know how to answer that. He hadn’t been okay since the day they’d left Insomnia and Nyx knew that. His face must have said as much because Nyx grimaced at his own words, gritting his teeth and rolling his eyes. Instead of waiting for an answer, he started over.

“Good morning, Prince Noctis. Um… Or, maybe, good afternoon would be more accurate.”

Nyx cracked a teasing grin, small and safe – and a sliver of normalcy that Noctis sorely missed. He sat up and rubbed the heels of his palms into his eyes, blinking at the slanted, ruddy light trickling through the window above the bed.

Gralea hummed, bloodless and mechanical, beyond the crumbly mold edging the window frame. There was always a mist clotting through the streets of the city, colored a dirty brown in the daylight; murky and iron-gray in the clouded nights. Light always seemed so strained from the skies above the industrial capital. Ironic, Noctis thought, that the city without a wall filtering the light was so much darker than the one that did. Gralea was all sharp steel and smokestacks; crowded, skeleton structures, neatly smashed together beneath the long shadows of massive bridges that stretched across the sky like spider-webs. It was a city full of hollowed-out apartments; the lights were all on, but nobody was home.

“Your Highness,” Nyx murmured. “Do you remember what happened?”

“I remember that I’ve asked you to call me Noct. Don’t remember what number this time makes though.”

It felt good to make Nyx smile. He could get him to smile all the time back in Insomnia, but ever since they’d come to Gralea, every time he looked at Nyx, he was dropping a sad stare or biting down hard on a snarl when he had to escort him back to the Chancellor’s suite.

He did remember what Nyx was asking. Mostly. He remembered waking in the dead of night and thinking that he never woke at all. He remembered thinking that this was another, nightly trick. Another fantasy, dangling hope on a string just out of his reach. He remembered expecting the inevitable failure. He remembered knowing that he would get up, follow Nyx, make it just to the threshold of freedom, and then be dragged back to his warden by his ankles, clawing at the dirt and begging for Nyx to turn around and save him. But Nyx never turned around at the ends of those nightmares. He never seemed to know that he was gone, and he went on without him.

He didn’t remember how they got to the hidden wall at the back of the yard. He remembered taking Nyx’s hand to climb it though. And he remembered that Nyx caught him when he jumped down to the other side. He didn’t remember where they went after that. The dream should have ended before he took Nyx’s hand. He shouldn’t have been able to feel how warm it was around his, how steady and strong as it gripped him tight and took him up out of his Hell.

He remembered that he shouldn’t be here. He remembered that there was a king who might have been his father who was relying on him to suffer for his freedom. He remembered a princess made of swan feathers and sylleblossoms.

“How long have I been gone?” Noctis asked, startling into full alert and whipping his head back towards the sunlight.

“You’ve been asleep all day. We checked in around four this morning.”

Noctis bolted to his feet, getting caught in the sheet he’d thrown from his shoulders. It tripped and pitched him towards the door he had to go back through. Nyx caught him before he slammed into the filthy floor, hands around his arms. Hands that were firm, but careful. Hands that had ruined everything by taking his out of that prison cell.

Noctis shrugged him off, stumbling back into the wall to battle with his bearings. His vision lurched and his head throbbed from the abrupt movement, trying to catch up with far too many hours of sleep.

He’d thought it was a dream. He would have never gone with him if he had known that it was real.

“I’m not allowed to leave, Nyx. You _know_ that I can’t leave. The treaty said…”

“What? What did the treaty say, exactly?”

Nyx stood at the center of the drooping room, arms crossed evenly over his chest. His eyes were as hard as the faded concrete, gray as the weary stone closing in on them from all sides. Noctis remembered that they used to have a little more blue in them. He remembered they used to be sharp and bright like pinpricks of starlight, even on the most lightless nights. He missed that. He missed being able to see in colors. But the Empire bleached that out; a society of monochrome and metal.

Nyx was expecting an answer, but Noctis had none to give. Which, he then realized, was the whole point of the glaive’s wasteland stare.

“We don’t really know, do we?” Nyx said. “We know that it was you for the Princess, yeah. After that, well, what is there to say that you have to stay? The trade happened. It’s not like there’s a take-back clause written in the fine print, right?”

“For all I know, _yeah,_ there is exactly that! You really want to gamble with the freedom of Lucis on a loophole that might not even exist? We could have just restarted the war, Nyx! I thought _you_ , of all people, would want us to stay at peace, no matter the –”

“Not this cost!” Nyx snapped, proceeding to pace the miniscule space, muscles coiled tight between the limited movements. “The Empire asks too much. That… that _thing_ , the Chancellor, _takes_ too much. He spits on this treaty with every spell he waves into your head. If this keeps up, if you stay, you’ll be dead before you ever get to see the peace you signed your life away for.”

“That’s what we do, Nyx. It’s politics, we have to make sacrifices…”

“This isn’t a sacrifice, this is a homicide!”

Nyx’s eyes flashed like cut steel. In the close quarters, Noctis could feel the heat of his anger pulsing off of him. He’d always known that Nyx hated the arrangement, but he had never shown Noctis just how much because he _couldn’t_ while they were under the Empire’s eye. The Emperor’s palace – which rarely ever hosted the Emperor himself – was haunted by the Chancellor’s shadows. Ardyn kept eyes in every dark corner, waiting to catch the slightest hitch in measured steps and listening for words that were never said out loud.

They were free from those unseen eyes now. _We’re… free?_

“I don’t know what’s going to happen now,” Nyx said. “But I know that if either King Regis or Princess Lunafreya knew how you ended up, the treaty would be voided in an instant. And I know that when I signed on to the Kingsglaive, it was to defend the kingdom of Lucis from monsters like this. You’re a part of that kingdom, too.”

Noctis looked down at his shoes. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know what to do. He knew that this was what he was _meant_ to do; that he was just one piece in a messy puzzle and that he had to play his part to make the picture work. But he also knew that he hated it. He knew that he hated being afraid of his own mind. He hated feeling so _breakable_. He hated that Nyx could only look at him with despair rather than with the warm wit that Noctis remembered like a ghost of a different, dead man in the back of his head.

He wanted to escape. He wanted to go home. He wanted to see the muted light, fogged over and blurry in his memory.

But he wanted to be a good prince, too. He wanted to stop seeing MT eyes on every TV screen. He wanted his people to feel safe in their home, to be free to travel beyond the Wall. He wanted to demolish the Wall itself. He wanted to take away the reason they even needed it.

He wanted his father to live, whoever he may be. He wanted this princess – “Lunafreya,” Nyx had said; _Lunafreya_ _is her name_ – to be free. There were others whose happiness he was trying to fulfill. Their faces were covered in shadows that he hadn’t created.

He knew that if he wanted any of that, then he had to stay. He knew that the only way they could be free was if he was not. He’d always known that.

Yet, still… he wanted more.

“Highness…”

“ _Noct_ , please, _please_ , just call me by name.”

His own voice got away from him, sound crashing from his lips like tires screeching into oncoming traffic. He bit the inside of his mouth and breathed in deep, trying to tame some semblance of control over… _anything_. Nyx breathed as Noctis breathed, both of them fighting for it in the heavy air. Gralea hummed around them, out-of-sight machinery vibrating in the moldy walls.

“Noct,” Nyx said, quietly. “Don’t you think that if the treaty was forfeit by you running away, we’d be hearing it blaring over every speaker in the city right about now?”

Noctis glanced up at him, then out the little window. The same, eerie quiet of every Gralean evening whispered throughout the city. The speakers and screens were all turned off for the night, nothing but lazy blinks of distant red lights and apartment lamps muted by pulled-down shades. If he listened carefully, he could hear the hidden, haunting march of MT security guards prowling the streets.

No emergency reports. No breaking news. No lockdown sirens. And the controlled calm in Nyx’s gaze informed him that there’d been none of any of that during all the time he’d been asleep, either.

“They have to know you’re gone by now,” Nyx said. “And they haven’t sounded the alarm. They’re going to be after us, I’m sure, but they’re not broadcasting it to the entire world or pointing fingers at Insomnia. I doubt it’s because they want to keep the peace as badly as we do, but whatever the reason, we can use the quiet to our advantage. It’ll be a little easier to slip out of the city without the entire populace looking for us.”

Nyx turned into one of the adjoining rooms while Noctis processed the reality of their situation. For a moment, he was paralyzed by the fear that it was all too simple to be real. They had just… _left._ And there wasn’t a squad of screaming, magitek husks clawing at their door. There were no warships ascending back into the sky to aim at Insomnia again.

There was nothing. And something about that scared Noctis more than if there had been anything else.

He crept around the corner into the room Nyx had squeezed into, comforted by having him within his line of sight. The right-most room trapped an old kitchenette between its walls, stove-top stained and choking with rust. There was a tiny fridge that smelled like rainwater and a microwave so old and worn that the buttons had no numbers on them. Yet, Nyx seemed to know his way around the faulty machines like he’d been the one to break them in the first place. Two boxes of microwaveable meals were set on the counter next to a small pack of eight ounce water bottles that he took and shoved as far back into the refrigerator as he could fit them.

“Sorry that I couldn’t score you some coffee,” Nyx teased.

“Where did you find all of that?”

“Convenience store, next door. Ran in-and-out while you were sleeping.”

“Oh… sorry about that.”

Nyx shook his head and smiled, studying the instructions on the box of frozen food before setting the plastic dish in the microwave.

“It’s better that you slept then. We can get around quicker and easier at night, anyway.”

“We’re leaving tonight? Even with the MTs out?”

“Even with,” Nyx confirmed, squinting at the button-pad as he input the appropriate time for the meal. “MTs are easy enough to work around. People, not so much. In case we do stumble into some late-night traffic though, there’s a change of clothes for you in the bathroom.”

Noctis’s brow creased in confusion, looking down at his own clothes. Nyx pointed at the subtle skull motifs littered across his shirt and pressed the power button. The microwave awoke with a sputter and a groan, the turntable grinding in a halting cackle as the food defrosted.

“Might turn some heads to see reminders of the royal crest,” Nyx explained. “We have to try blending in until we’re out of Niflheim territory.”

“Is there even such a thing as ‘out of Niflheim territory’ anymore?”

His laughter was as harsh as the truth. When Lucis had surrendered Noctis, it had surrendered the remainder of the territories surrounding Insomnia with him. The world belonged to the Empire now.

“The borders might belong to the Nifs, but the people do not,” Nyx said, sounding as if he was trying to convince himself more than Noctis. “We just need to get out of Niflheim and get into Tenebrae. We should be safe enough there to get a message to the King. If we’re lucky, maybe the Fleuret household will take us in. Maybe if we’re luckier, Her Highness herself will be there.”

He was counting on a lot of luck to get them through this, Noctis thought, but he didn’t have the heart to debate it with him. Not when Nyx’s resolve brimmed taut in his shoulders and ignited the color back into his eyes. Little licks of blue fire that warmed the fringes of Noct’s fears.

“Are you with me, Noct?”

He was asking him two questions, Noctis realized. Would he go with him, and was he really there, _with him_. Was he in the right moment? Was he seeing the right things? Guilt stabbed through his chest over the fact that Nyx had to ask. That Nyx couldn’t trust his mind any more than Noctis could. It hurt to watch that little blue flame falter with doubts, but Noctis couldn’t blame him for it.

“Yeah. I… I want to go home.”

His breath shook on a long sigh. It felt good to be allowed to say what he truly wanted without the fear that it could be used against him. The way Nyx’s face lifted with a relieved grin told Noctis that he wasn’t alone.

“There’s no shower,” Nyx said, nodding to the last room Noctis had yet to explore, “but you can use the sink to clean up a little, if you need to.”

Noctis ventured into the dingy bathroom while Nyx duked it out with the microwave settings. It was just a slip of space with hardly enough room to stretch his arms; toilet in the corner, counter to the side, and a frameless mirror hung above it with a crack in the top corner. Nyx must have set out the basic amenities before he’d woken up. There was a small bottle of cheap shampoo, a bar of soap, a tiny tube of toothpaste, and a blue toothbrush still in its plastic wrapper.

A plain, gray shirt and a matching hoodie were folded on the counter, price-tags in the wicker waste-basket by his feet. Noctis closed the door and shrugged out of his jacket, folding it into a neat square like he remembered… someone doing it. The face was fuzzy, but he remembered hands. He remembered clean hands with long, nimble fingers, expertly folding and pressing and sewing ripped clothes.

Noctis set the jacket on the counter and took off his shirt. Another missing face nudged against his memory. Another set of hands linking around his elbow and jerking him into a department store. Wrists wound in bracelets, clicking together as the shirt was thrown at him. Fingers tapping camera flashes and a warbled voice that sounded like it could be mocking a runway show.

There was a face behind the bracer on his left hand, too. Calloused hands nursing angry, red marks on his palm. Broad knuckles, knotted with muscle, clenched around the hilt of a greatsword. Rough hands; kind hands, beating against his back and mussing up his hair.

He could remember all of these hands, but not the faces that went with them. He couldn’t even hear voices to match. But he held onto those hands. Tightly. He didn’t know who they belonged to, but he knew that, no matter what, he could not let them go.

“They let _you_ go, though.”

Noctis jumped back against the wall, wincing as the long ropes of scar tissue agitated with the collision. He’d been avoiding the mirror. He’d kept himself just out of frame, but his silent musings over the hands in his memory must have drifted him closer.

He knew he’d be there, black scourge dripping from beneath the brim of his hat. He was always there. Always in the mirrors.

“They let you go,” he said again. “They didn’t even try to stop you. They just shook your hand and didn’t hold on. Do you truly think this will be any different? The same hands that took you away from me can just as easily take you back, husband mine.”

He never lifted his head. He never showed Noctis his eyes until the very end. Not until he’d talked him into broken pieces. Not until he’d beaten his brain with black phantoms and he begged him to let him go. And most times, not even then. Most times, he didn’t show him his eyes until Noctis had screamed himself silent. Not until he knew he could have the very last scream.

He raised his arm, soaked with unholy ink, and beckoned to him with a curl of his fingers.

“Come closer to the mirror, husband dear. If you want to see your friends so badly, you know where they are.”

Those weren’t his friends. Those beady, blinking yellow eyes, deep in the folds of his coat, were not his friends. _No._ He knew that they weren’t real, those horrible, warped daemons that dug claws into his throat and dragged him into the mirror when he got too close. They couldn’t be real. He told himself that every night, but it never stopped them from hurting him. It never stopped them from crawling into his bed and climbing past his lips and settling behind his heart to poison his blood and tear him apart from the inside-out.

He was lifting his face. The brim of his hat was turning up.

Noctis squeezed his eyes shut, hugging his arms around his chest and sliding down to the sticky floor. When he hit the ground, he felt something move in his pants pocket. He almost screamed, afraid it was one of _them_ , wriggling beneath his clothes before digging sharp teeth into his skin.

But it was a tiny, white figure that slid from his pocket, not a writhing, black daemon. Noctis scooped it up, cradling the delicate figure in his palm.

He remembered this. He remembered the man that might have been his father – both silver-haired and in a pin-stripe suit – holding him in his lap as they thanked the motionless creature. He remembered a massive daemon in the Citadel and being so afraid. Almost as afraid as he was now. He remembered that the little, silver creature made him brave. He remembered that it was supposed to show him what was real.

“This is real,” he whispered to himself, clasping the figurine between both hands in a prayer and whispering the words until he could believe them. “This is real.”

The room was real. The toy was real. _Nyx_ was real. And he was just outside, just a few steps away, and he was going to save him. Nyx was real and he hated this city. Too much to ever leave Noctis in it.

_This is real. This is real. This is real._

When he opened his eyes, the reflection was gone. His breaths came out in ruins, scraping, gaping sounds that he quickly tried to control. Breathing was real. He remembered how to breathe. If he remembered how to breathe, he remembered what was real. He was fine. He could do this.

_Just stay away from the mirrors._


End file.
